Читать книгу Mystery Cases of Letitia Carberry, Tish - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 20

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Aggie being better, and having declared that no power on earth would make her spend another night in the place, we planned to leave about noon that day. But Tish's astonishing conduct drove all idea of going from our minds.

In the first place, Miss Lewis came in from breakfast looking a little bit better, and insisted on giving Tish's knee its massage, as usual. But Tish was sitting poring over the notes she had made, and wouldn't even so much as look up.

"Get away," she snarled, with her pencil in her teeth. "There's nothing wrong with my knee."

Miss Lewis looked at me.

'There was something wrong with it yesterday," she said, with her thumbs tucked inside her belt and her spectacles flashing. "It's got cured pretty quick, I think."

"I don't employ you to think," said Tish, hopping past her and opening the lower bureau drawer.

"You needn't employ me at all."

"That's a fact," Tish said. "It hadn't occurred to me. You go in and take care of Miss Pilkington to-day. Miss Lewis. There's nothing pleases her like being taken care of."

"There's nothing the matter with Miss Pilkington, either," snapped Miss Lewis, but Tish was getting down on her knees by the drawer, groaning as she did it, and she only threw an absent reply over her shoulder. "Oh, well," she said, "you know what I mean. I didn't mean to offend you. You're a good nurse, but I've got something else on hand.! Give Miss Pilkington a bath and put talcum on; she'll take to it like a baby."

Miss Lewis opened her mouth to refuse, thought better of it, and went to Aggie's room. Tish drew a long sigh.

"Thank heaven!" she said. "They'll keep each other busy for the rest of the day."

Which they did. Aggie emerged from her room when Tish and I, breathless and dirty, got back late that morning. She was powdered and manicured, curled and French-puffed, and she knew the history of every private case on the floor; name, age, family scandal and operation. She was primed to talk, but by that time Tish and I had no time to stop. Things were approaching a climax.

Well, Miss Lewis and Aggie off our hands, Tish emptied the lower drawer and spread its contents on the floor in front of her. First of all, she laid out the two roller towels, with the S. P. T. showing. Then followed the brown tweed coot, secured by a dollar to Jacobs, the small surgeon's knife, the dented brass candlestick, the bandage Linda Smith had picked up in the upper hall, the linen room key, and Charlie Sands' letter about Hero at the Zoo. Then with the sheet of note-paper in her hand, she began to play a sort of checkers with the different things. The two S. P. T. towels she put together and using this combination as a king, she proceeded to jump the other articles, one by one, moving them around aimlessly in the intervals and consulting her notes.

At the end of the game, as well as I could make out, the king had it. At least, the two towels seemed to have Charlie Sands' letter checkmated in a comer, and the other articles lay in a humiliated heap on Tish's lap.

"Well," I said, "I see the towels win, although I think you cheated once."

Tish stuffed the notes into the bosom of her dress and tumbled the other things back in the drawer. Then she got up, making horrible faces as she straightened her knee.

"I'm sorry if s raining, Lizzie," she said,

'We'll have to go out."

"Where!" I asked sarcastically. "To the matinée?"

"To the Zoo," she replied, and hauling down her bonnet from the cupboard, stuck it on her head. "Shall we need a taxicab?"

"Probably, if you intend to go out in your nightgown," I said coldly.

But if I expected Tish to be confused, I was disappointed. With her bonnet still on, she put on her shoes and stockings, her black broadcloth skirt, a lamb's wool vest and her long fur coat. It wasn't until she was finished that she remembered her nightgown underneath everything.

"It's a little long, isn't it?" she said, when she'd started for the door, with six inches of white trailing all around her. "Pin it up, Lizzie; that's a good girl."

"I'll do nothing of the sort," I said. "If you want to make a goose of yourself with a knee that you are forbidden to step on, and maybe a taxicab accident with you fixed like that underneath, I'm not going to be a party to it."

"Very well!" said Tish', and getting a pair 'of scissors, she was about to cut off eight inches of her best French gown, when I weakened and got the safety pins. It was plain, Tish was in no mood to stop at trifles. I made her as respectable as possible, at least on the surface, and by that time, seeing she was determined to go, I got ready and went with her.

Now, a patient can't leave a hospital without a card being sent down, signed by the interne and countersigned by the superintendent, and brought back by the elevator boy for the signatures of his family, his friends and the police bureau, or something almost as complicated. But not knowing anything of this, Tish and I went down in the elevator, past the door-man and out the front door, called a taxicab and drove away with perfect ease and calmness.

We went to the Zoo. That is generally known now, although that Tish went in her nightgown is here for the first time set forth. But what we did at the Zoo I do not know exactly. I might as well have been back with Aggie, being bathed and talcumed. Tish let me pay the taxicab, pointed to a chair in the ante-room, and spent twenty minutes in the private office of the superintendent

I was rather bitter about it. In the first place, I don't like Zoos, and in the second place, after I had been there ten minutes, a man in uniform came in and examined all the corners of the room and turned over every chair. When he came to the one I was in, he said, "Excuse me, ma'am, but you haven't noticed a small green snake with red and yellow markings anywhere around here, have you?"

I was frozen in my chair.

"No," I replied as calmly as I possibly could, "Unless I absent-mindedly put him in my handbag!"

"Oh, I didn't mean that, lady," he hastened to explain, "I meant—he may be curled on the rungs of your chair."

I got up at that almost instantaneously and he tilted the chair over. "Not here," he said, disappointed. "Little devil, this is the third time this week!"

Is he—is he poisonous?" I asked. Well," he said thoughtfully, "personally, I shouldn't care to sit down on him in the dark."

He went out and dosed the door, and when Tish came back, she declares I was standing in the middle of the room with my skirts held up, and turning slowly around in a circle.

There was a glitter in Tish's eye that I had never seen there before, as we drove back to the hospital. I attempted to explain a little of how I felt at being left in a place like that, where at any moment something might break loose for the third time that week, and why I was turning around, but she told me tartly not to bother her.

We returned to the hospital in silence, and I paid for the taxicab. It was not until we were back in Tish's room, and had put her into her chair and got a hot-water bottle under her knee, which had gone on a strike about that time and refused to bend at all, that I spoke.

"Well?" I asked.

"Well—what?"

"Have they lost anything? Any animals?"

"No," said Tish calmly. "I knew that before I went there. Aggie, what day was it the two medical internes left?"

"This is Friday," I said. "It was Tuesday evening, Tish."

"I thought so," she observed. "Now reach me my notes, Lizzie, and go call Bates."